The lighting model looks simpler, but Aidan's detail levels are closer to the PC High settings than PC Medium. It looks like the engine uses a Depth of Field filter to keep your eyes focused on Aidan's face when set in High mode, whereas Medium uses no such filter.Ĭompare the two PC shots against the Xbox One shot, and we've got a different set of tradeoffs in play. Oddly enough, the boxes in the rear of the shot are actually noticeably sharper in the Medium setting compared to High. Facial details are blurred, as is his facial hair. The collar of Aidan's shirt loses its ribbing, his jacket loses some of the deformation over the right shoulder, and its texturing takes a step downwards. First, the PC Medium settings clearly aren't using tessellation as much as the High settings, if they're using it at all. There's some really interesting differences here. We'll start with a scene from the opening of the game, in which the protagonist has a calm discussion of principles with a fixer, Maurice.Ĭlick to enlarge: Xbox One (left), PC Medium (middle), PC High (right). We're going to show you three detail settings - in every case, the Xbox One is on the far left, followed by the PC on Medium Texture / Medium Detail, followed by the PC on High Texture / High Detail. Which detail settings you can choose has a significant impact on how good Watch Dogs looks on the PC compared to its console cousin.
If you don't have at least 2GB of VRAM, you're going to be cranking the details lower to compensate in Watch Dogs - and that may effectively cut visual quality below what the Xbox One or PS4 can offer. Comments in that thread bore out the idea that frame buffer memory is the principle performance culprit multiple readers claimed that they saw excellent performance from lower-end GTX 760s with 4GB of RAM, while others with smaller frame buffers ran into more erratic performance, even with more powerful GPUs. If you've got 1.5GB or less on your graphics card, you're going to be compromising on visuals to keep the frame rate steady. One thing to keep in mind is that Watch Dogs is ridiculously hard on frame buffer memory. Here, we'll step through the game's pre-rendered movies as well as some actual gameplay and perform some video comparisons for you all. Based on our results, and depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One (and possibly the PS4 option, though we didn't compare against it) might be the better option. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, we decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic PC play, challenges that concept.
Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer - at least, for PC users.